Kerry Howard

Watch Laura arrive at her sister's flat in Him & Her (2010). She has barely got through the door before the first slight lands, and Howard delivers it so briskly, in a voice pitched for good news, that Becky is apologising before she has worked out what for. Nothing in the performance winks at us. Laura does not know she is the villain, and Howard never lets on that she does.

We laughed at her for a long time. Then, during another afternoon of who sits where and whose turn it is to make the tea, we stopped laughing and felt slightly sick, because we recognised the afternoon and were not certain we had always been on the receiving end of it. Stefan Golaszewski writes those small tyrannies exactly, and Howard plays them without ever asking to be forgiven. Beside her, Ricky Champ's Paul laughs at his own jokes before he has finished them, and the two of them make a couple you would cross a supermarket to avoid. It is the reason a great many people watched the series and a fair number switched off.

It is also the limit of the part. Howard is asked to play one note for 25 episodes, and a viewer who cannot stand Laura by episode three has our sympathy. She had come up through small television roles and the 2009 remake of Reggie Perrin, as Vicky, before Laura made her name, and she has been plain about what the part cost her: "I really wanted to do something so different from Laura... I didn't want to spend my career playing a bitch."

So she did something different. Witless (2016), written by Joe Tucker and Lloyd Woolf, gave her a lead as Leanne opposite Zoe Boyle, the two of them mismatched in the way that comedy-drama likes and the situation rather higher in stakes than a Sunday roast. We have not reviewed it and will not judge it here. The film work has been supporting parts, Clare in I Give It a Year (2013), and the television since has been the same: Sarah Coombes in Ted Lasso (2020), Trace in The Outlaws (2021), turns in Two Weeks to Live and Beyond Paradise. She is busy, and she is rarely the point.

What she does well has not changed. The timing is quick and unfussy, she is at her best in a pair where the other person is quieter, and she can make insecurity look like confidence for exactly as long as the character needs to. Whether anyone will write her a part that uses all of that again, rather than a week of it, is the open question. She asked for variety and got it. We would still like to see her handed another Laura, one who is given, somewhere around episode four, a reason to notice someone else.